Social Caseworkers at Denver’s Department of Human Services maintain a call center to report child abuse. It is part of the state wide network from Colorado Department of Human Services that began one year before this photo was taken Wednesday, Dec. 30, 2015.

A $25.3 million overhaul to the computer system that is supposed to protect Colorado children from abuse and neglect has gone so terribly awry that children are in harm’s way, county officials recently told state officials.

The Colorado Human Services Directors Association in an Oct. 19 letter to state officials warned the problems “are crippling our work and putting the safety of children and families at risk.”

“I’m most worried about child safety and something falling through the cracks,” said Dan Makelky, director of the Douglas County Department of Human Services who, as president of the county directors association, authored the letter. “I don’t think there is a choice. This has to get fixed. We need some urgency from the state.”

Among the most crucial functions of the computer system is the role it plays in assessing the risk a child faces when allegations of abuse are made. The system processes information from child protective staffers investigating alleged abuse to help guide decisions on whether to remove a child from a troubled home.

But the rollout of the new system has generated so many issues, the state’s help tech desk has been besieged by more than 3,000 requests for help from county child protective workers. Since the upgraded system went operational this past summer, it has crashed repeatedly without any alerts to county officials, Makelky said. When it is up and running, the system does not properly assess the level of danger for abused children, he added.

“Our workers rely on that system to look at the prior history of a family,” Makelky said. “And if the system goes down, they’re flying blind in terms of making critical decisions about a child’s safety.”

The county association’s letter was sent to Reggie Bicha, executive director of the Colorado Department of Human Services, and Suma Nallapati, Colorado’s secretary of technology and the state’s chief information officer.

Bicha and Nallapati responded to the complaints of the county association last Thursday, two days after The Denver Post asked state officials about the computer upgrade complaints. In a letter back to the county association, the two state officials said they “are moving expeditiously” to address the persistent problems.

The state is coming up with workarounds while some of the bigger issues get fixed, said David McCurdy, the chief technological officer in the governor’s office of information technology. He stressed that the modernization to the computer system eventually will yield benefits that reduce red tape that has burdened child protective staffers for years. Future updates planned in 2019 also will help create a more seamless experience, he added.

“Change is always a painful thing, but the state will be in a much better place as the system gets fixed,” he said.

When the new system went live in late July, staffers of the statewide child abuse hotline for several weeks lost their ability to process information in the computer system, Makelky’s letter states. The state never told county officials their hotline workers were shut out of the system, prompting widespread chaos.

The upgraded computer system is performing so poorly that child protective staffers spend, on average, an hour longer to complete assessments that determine whether a child should be removed from their home and placed in foster care, according to recent data. In more complex assessments, the delays drag on for days or weeks due to the technological issues, said Julie Krow, El Paso County’s executive director of human services.

“Sometimes neglect gets scored as an abuse case or abuse as a neglect case,” Krow said. “If one county does a risk assessment, and the family shows up in another county, the new county workers might rely on the system to make faulty decisions about that family or child. High risk shows up as moderate risk at times, which could potentially end up with a child being harmed.”

The Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System, more commonly referred to as Trails, is used by about 6,000 public officials. It integrates with 11 other state systems that track child abuse and neglect cases, provider licenses, children and youth in the youth corrections system, foster and adoptive services and data required to gauge program effectiveness and adherence with government safety standards. State and county officials refer to the computer system as the backbone to Colorado’s child-protective system.

County child protection staff and supervisors say they have sometimes had to identify in the computer system potential witnesses of child abuse as clients needing services for abusive tendencies. Such entries are vexing because they end up labeling innocent people as child abusers, which could impact future employment since employers often check the computer system when making sensitive hires.

The modernization to Trails was a key part of Gov. John Hickenlooper’s reforms he promised after investigative reports in 2012 from The Denver Post and 9News. The newspaper and 9News partnered to review the cases of 72 children whose families or caregivers were known to the state’s child protective system before their death and found a lack of coordination between county and state officials, funding inequities across the state, lax state standards and overburdened child protective workers.

In the wake of the newspaper’s reports, Hickenlooper pledged that he would hire more child-protective staff and make other fixes. His promises included a technological upgrade he said would give a boost to child protective workers. They would be armed with mobile and computer tablets that would allow them to make in-the-field decisions that would protect the state’s most vulnerable children, the state said.

Beginning in 2015, Hickenlooper began putting resources toward modernizing the Trails child protective computer system, which was first put to use in Colorado in 2001. Federal authorities agreed that the state could use federal aid to pay half the upgrade costs. Each year, since then the state has continued to press the modernization project.

County officials say that when the upgraded system went live this year, they were swamped with complaints from their child protective staff. The main contractor the state hired to overhaul Trails, CGI Technologies and Solutions Inc. of Fairfax, Va., has resisted fixing problems because CGI contends those fixes aren’t part of the original scope of work, according to the letter from the county association.

Contract documents show the state originally planned to pay CGI nearly $10 million for its portion of the Trails upgrades. Those documents show the state repeatedly amended CGI’s contracts to raise the price the state owed CGI to more than $18 million, nearly double the original amount.

“What counties desire now is an urgency of action mirroring their own and a high-level awareness of the very real consequences caused by this latest release of Modernized Trails,” the Colorado Human Services Directors Association said in a report accompanying the Oct. 19 letter. “Most importantly, counties are concerned about the risk to child safety when the new Modernized Trails system cannot be trusted as presently released.”

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A Sept. 18 memo from Minna Castillo Cohen, the director of the Colorado Department of Human Services’ office of children youth and families, acknowledged “55 bugs” in the modernized Trails system had been discovered, but said progress was being made on those issues.

The letter from the county association said that memo’s accounting downplayed the problems and differed from the 171 issues the state admitted a week earlier had been identified.

“In this informational memo, eight weeks after the release of Modernized Trails, the state acknowledged problems but listed no plan of action,” the county association says.

“The rollout of the project has been met with frustration from users as well as supervisors, managers and directors and has compounded the challenges and shortcomings of a nearly 20-year-old system,” the county association’s letter states.

Christopher N. Osher is a reporter on the investigation team at The Denver Post who has covered law enforcement, judicial and regulatory issues for the news organization. He also has reported from war zones in Africa.